Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (3 page)

It startled me a little.

I wasn’t given to wrapping myself around strangers. As they continued talking, I interrogated myself. Was I lonely? That didn’t seem right; I’d been away from home for four months, but in New Orleans, I’d connected with an old love interest, and loved, been loved while I was there. I figured I was probably disoriented, but I couldn’t see why I’d try to orient myself around some random French guy.

Eventually, he hopped out of the pool and put pants on. When he came back, we sat next to each other at the edge of the water. We pointed to each other’s tattoos and talked about them by giving key words about their histories, our faces close. “I cannot make tattoo,” Jimmy said, from where he was hanging in the deep end near us, shaking his head. “About ze needles … I am.…” He mimicked cringing, a kind of prissiness, while searching for any English word in his vocabulary that might convey it. “I am …
gay
.” When I left to go shower for bed, both of them urged me to instead shower and meet them back on the hotel porch.

There, Haiti’s most famous
mizik rasin
(“roots music”) band, fronted by the hotel’s proprietor, was gearing up to play the regular Thursday-night gig that drew huge mixed crowds from across Port-au-Prince. I made an appearance, as I’d promised the boys, but only briefly. The hotel was suddenly packed. It was hot and loud. Nico reached in his pocket and shook car keys at me when I mimed that he wasn’t drinking like everyone else, and I wasn’t, either. I told them I couldn’t stay, that I had to get up early to maybe go with Marc as he helped rape survivors, and they shook their heads and pooled their English to say it was like that all the time in the camps, the violence and rape—a
lot
of rape, they repeated. Soon, the rest of their unit crowded around us, thrilled to meet a U.S. citizen; they were provincial French, not Parisian-mean. They spoke even less English than Nico and Jimmy did but were drunkenly determined to try, enthusiastically shouting one word at a time in my face, any word, as it came to them.

“Hello!”

“New York!”

I said good night. I kissed everyone, the men, their female lieutenant, on both cheeks when they leaned in the way the French do. “Too many French people,” I said as I kissed Nico’s second. I paced the floor when I got back to my room, brushing my teeth and debating going back to get him. Tired, conscious of my work and wary of the crowd, I reluctantly decided against it.

When he knocked on my door five minutes later, he could tell, he would say later, what the answer was the moment he saw my face, but he asked me the question he’d been standing outside practicing the whole time anyway. “Excuse me. But, just to know please if I can to kiss you.”

Minutes later, he was gone. Within those minutes, I became desperate to remain in his presence, which, despite how fast I could feel his heart beating, felt anchored, solid, despite his being sent to a country where he didn’t belong, touching a girl he didn’t know. I’d been right to want to be close to him in the pool, rooted low and deep as he was. When he had to leave, his curfew calling him from the perfect connectivity of our mouths, time to round the troops back up into the truck, we parted with surprising resistance and inappropriate quantities of tenderness given the circumstances.

He went back to the camp where they slept. I went to bed with earplugs in, blocking the rock show still raging above, depending on sleep to help me settle into my surroundings, however unsettled they felt. The previous night, one of the locals at the bar had tried to tell me how the earthquake had affected him, and had resorted to a rhetorical, unanswerable half-question. “When the very ground beneath your feet betrays you?” he’d said, shortly before trailing off entirely.

The next morning, I woke up early and had a roll with some butter on it and went out to work and something happened inside me, and whatever it was, however many years I would spend trying to figure it out, I wasn’t the same anymore after that.

2.

As my early interviewees, and the Frenchmen, had said: In the dark, security-less tent cities, full of orphans and widows living under plastic sheets, rape was rampant and unchecked.

Marc called to say he was indeed picking me up. From the moment I got into his car, every conversation and every interaction centered on sexual violence and violation; dripped with horror and graphic details of bloody injuries. Of course the trauma didn’t end—it never ended—with the rape itself, and I started the morning watching how it continued in ways that I had never anticipated. I was speechless during our first stop, when a female doctor turned to me during a consult with a rape victim and demanded: Did I understand the situation? Did I understand that this was what happened to girls like this one, who have children but are not married? That this wasn’t one of those tragedies in which an
innocent
girl is raped?

“Remember when I told you that in Haiti people blame the woman when she gets raped?” Marc asked me quietly as we walked out of the hospital. Later, he said, “Some people say going to the doctor when you get raped is like getting attacked again.”

And then, after we drove away from the hospital, I saw something.

That’s all. I’m not going to say much about it. I witnessed something very suddenly. It had something to do with a rape. I was extremely startled by the scene and by the sudden screaming—not mine, but the closest I’d ever been to anyone’s complete and abject terror. So close and so shocking that I lost myself to it.

The whole situation was immeasurably worse for those more directly involved, and they later decided they didn’t want to talk about it. The exact details are as bad as you might imagine, or worse than you could imagine, and I won’t share them so as not to risk retraumatizing anyone. Even if I did want to share them, I probably couldn’t, the subject so raw and complicated that it spiraled out in ways I can’t describe, with privacy and ownership debates and lawyers. Part of the chaos formed by trauma’s wide path. I raise the situation because the next several years of my life were shaped by it. It was a witnessing and a sound but, more, it was the way it landed on me, the screaming and terror from just a few inches away penetrating and dispersing me.

That’s what I’m going to tell you about. The dispersing.

For a second, I felt intense panic.

Then suddenly, I disappeared.

*   *   *

On a street in Port-au-Prince on September 17, 2010, just before eleven in the morning on a Friday, downtown was hot and bustling, and I lost myself in place and time and in my body.

In fact, I was in a car.
You’re in the car
, something inside me said, and I knew that I was in the car, but I couldn’t feel myself in it; I couldn’t feel my body sitting there, or feel myself inside my flesh, since there was that screaming and screaming and terror and I burst into a deep, frantic confusion about where I was. Soon, the screaming stopped. In seconds, the alarm was over. I could see that, sure as I was still registering the rest of the scene, but all I could feel was a disembodied version of myself hovering somewhere behind me and to the left, outside my car window.

Who are those people?
I could hear it asking about everyone inside.
What’s that awful thing going on inside that car?

I hadn’t ever had my consciousness separate from my anatomy before. That made me lucky, I would later learn. But in the moment, though it was extremely disconcerting, I didn’t have time to think or worry about it.

I had a big workday ahead of me yet. There were hours of interviews to do and people to meet—whether I was in my body or not. And so I got on with my work with my fixer, Marc.

*   *   *

Marc, stocky Marc, in his late thirties and wearing designer eye glass frames, who sweated his balls off in his un-air-conditioned jeep and jeans and polo, weaving through cars and rubble and constantly answering his phone—“I’m like an ambulance,” he said. “People are always calling to say someone got raped.” Marc also seemed disturbed by the morning’s events. We went to the bank to withdraw funds to move the anti-rape activist we were going to pick up into hiding. Someone had threatened to shoot her for standing up for rape victims. While we waited our turn, Marc alternated between silence and shell-shocked exclamations about how terrifying the screaming and witnessing was.

Silence, silence, sitting in the bank lobby’s plastic chairs. Then: “That was crazy!”

Silence, silence, his elbows propped on knees knocked wide, before: “I’ve only seen things like that in movies!”

My own continuing reactions to the morning’s events were more internal. I thought I was doing all right, but I did notice some intermittent numbness and weirdness as we sped around Port-au-Prince. When we got to the headquarters of FAVILEK, whose Creole acronym stands for Women Victims Get Up Stand Up, I seemed fine enough to sense the force of Marc’s colleagues. Rape survivors all, in their forties and fifties, their fierceness ended up being a principal subject of the print feature I eventually turned in.

“We had this rape problem before the earthquake,” Yolande Bazelais, the president, told me. She was gorgeous and voluptuous, showing a lot of skin and sitting with the gravity of someone who didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought, gesturing calmly, the weight low in her hips. Her organization was founded by women who were raped during the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. “Now,” she said, “we have double problems.” That was a scary statement, given that a survey taken before the quake based only on
reported
rapes and sexual assaults put the number at fifty a day in Greater Port-au-Prince alone. More than half of the victims were minors. Marc and the FAVILEK founders said it had always been that way, with perpetrators that were neighbors or street thugs or police and paramilitaries, who used rape as a tool of intimidation and terror or who raped just because they could. Now, they said, FAVILEK’s resources were stretched thinner than ever. They got three or four calls a week about new cases from the dozen camps the organization attempted to cover. There were 1,300 camps in all.

As we sat in a circle of folding chairs, under a tarp in the driveway of another organization’s office because FAVILEK couldn’t afford one, the women explained that they needed two agents in each of the 1,300 camps instead of the one dozen agents total. Then, if they had the agents, and could pay them, which they couldn’t currently, they’d need the resources to help the victims. They said that the other day, a woman was raped and choked nearly to death; she called to say she was in hiding, but these women couldn’t help her, because they didn’t have the funds to pay for moving her someplace safe. They were struggling just to take care of their own, they said. The previous night, some hooligans who didn’t like that they were trying to help rape victims had ripped down one of their agent’s tents. As they talked, the women closest to me reached down to swat away the mosquitoes that landed on my bare ankles. One of them told me that in addition to being raped she’d had her legs smashed up. Another one had been shot.

The woman who had been shot became frustrated as I continued asking questions about the situation and what needed to change to improve it. “We meet with white people, and white people, and white people,” she said. She started raising her voice, and two women beside her put their hands out to calm her, holding her back but smiling. White people make promises but nothing ever, ever happens, she said. She was tired. She was exhausted, and at least they could have given them an office, and if I, White Girl, thought I was actually going to make something happen, she would give me her goddamned e-mail address.…

I could feel that she was upset. I could feel my conversational paralysis, that I had ten reasons to be uncomfortable: because I had no answers for the race issues she was raising, because yelling equaled conflict (which I hated), because why
was
I taking up their time when, as a journalist, I
wasn’t
there to help them, not exactly, so what the hell was my purpose? But at the same time, it didn’t really seem like she was talking to
me
; I was made of air. Enter the weirdness. If I wasn’t that real, it stood to reason that she wasn’t, either. I remember that she felt real anyway. I remember that I was taking notes. I remember that nothing outside the square under our tarp seemed to exist. I remember that I did not bother asking if the police were helping them, because the woman Marc and I had picked up on the way there had gone to the police to say she’d been threatened by a guy who said he would shoot her, and the policeman told her he wished he would have. That he should kill all the rape activists. And because earlier today, when Marc and I drove past a man in a blue button-down shirt who’d been identified by a victim as a rapist, and Marc tore around the corner and jumped out of the car to go collect the license plate number of the nice car he was getting into, he came back and said actually he didn’t know what he would do with it, since a guy who drove a car like that was probably friends with cops.

I did ask the FAVILEK founders about the UN. And the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, led by the country’s prime minister and Bill Clinton. Did they have any systematic plan for protecting the women in the camps at that time?

Their five heads shook instant, hard
No’
s.

The weirdness persisted. As dusk fell and Marc dropped me off at the edge of the largest tent city, 55,000 homeless people on a golf course turned displacement camp where a source lived, I felt extra spacey and flimsy. I figured I was tired from the long day. Marc didn’t want me to go.

“I’m black, and Haitian, and I wouldn’t go where you’re going right now, in the dark,” he said. He meant this: He would not go with me. So I got out of the car and walked to my meeting point with Daniel.

Daniel was built, serious looking, shorter than me, and sweet and in his twenties. We shook hands, and together we walked into the camp. My feet fell heavy on the uneven, dried-mud ground. But like the area outside the FAVILEK tarp, it didn’t seem to exist, either. I felt like I was floating through a stage set. Or like none of it was happening at all.